Education
Middlebury College.
Middlebury College.
After graduating from Middlebury in 1963, he would join the United States Army and serve during the mid-1960s. Competing in two Winter Olympics, Bower finished 15th in the Nordic combined event at Innsbruck in 1964 and 13th in the same event at Grenoble in 1968. After his retirement from Nordic combined competition, Bower would later go on to coach the Nordic skiing team for both the 1976 and 1980 Winter Olympics.
John Bower meanwhile became the first director of the Utah Olympic Park when it first opened in 1989.
Utah Olympic Park would later host several competitions during the 2002 Winter Olympics. In 1999, Sports Illustrated magazine ranked him 19th among Maine"s 50 Greatest Athletes of the 20th century.
The other North American winners are fellow Americans Kerry Lynch (1983 Nordic combined event) and Todd Lodwick (1998 Nordic combined 75 km sprint event), and Canadian Pierre Harvey (1988 50 km cross country skiing event).
He also became the first non-European to ever win at the Holmenkollen ski festival in Norway with his 1968 victory in the Nordic combined event. A native of Auburn, Maine, Bower would attend Middlebury College in Vermont where he would win the National Collegiate Athletic Association national championship in Nordic combined in 1961. Bower also won the national Nordic combined event four times (1963, 1966-1968). Bower"s son Ricky (born 1980) would win the Snowboarding half-pipe World Championships in Germany in 1999. As of 2007, he is one of only three Americans and one of only four North Americans to ever win anything at the Holmenkollen ski festival.
